Howdy everyone! I can't wait until I have the skills to help people!
Here's my question, (which is common, I know What is the best way to go about my Red Hat 7 install?
I am running an AMD at 1G, with 1 20g HDD and 2 60g storage HDDs. All Win9x. My 20g is the boot with no partitions. Should I ghost my Win9x to available space on one of my storage drives before the install or am I safe installing with LILO creating the patrition in the free space? I am about as green as can be with partitioning so the prospect of losing my Win 9x data and bootability scares the crap out of me.... Ghosting is a daunting prospect as well cause my vital schtuff on my boot is bulging at 8g. What's a Noob to do?

well, you should always backup data, that should go without saying.

but the standard advice that everyone gets is:

defragement your windows drive.
use fips to resize the partition.
install redhat with lilo.

and to install redhat easily, you'll want to reduce the win9x partition (C to 8gb at most, as your redht version is a little old, and must strat before the 8.4gb limit.

surely redhat 7 wouldnt have that problem?



see dood, thats why redhat sucks.



Get slackware or SuSE

Red Hat didn't allow activation of lba32 mode at install time until version 7.2

It is possible to install anywhere, but then you have to use a boot floppy, add lba32 to lilo.conf and then run /sbin/lilo

hm... imho, redhat7.2 is very nice... and now it comes with GRUB... a lot better than LILO... (LILO in rh7.0 corrupted my MBR)

again, imho, slackware or debian is a little tough for someone just starting out on linux? the installation is gonna be daunting unless you are a hardcore hardware hardnut ...

personally i started on mandrake and then moved on to redhat (ok to some out there, it's not much of progress eh? let's just leave it at personal taste... )

mandrake automates much of the partitioning and installation. good to start and learn from there...

I agree with gui10 mandrake is the easiest to partition especially since 7.0. Debian is the hardest to install and configure as most of it is not gui or automated. So if you don't know what you are doing with partitions I suggest like gui10 Mandrake then when you are comfortable with it move to Red Hat. It isn't much of a step either cause Mandrake is based mostly on Red Hat. So there it is in a nutshell.

hm... well my difficulty with debian then was not really coz there was no gui ( i installed redhat using text installation)

it was mainly coz you have to even select the drivers for the hardware yourself... was blurred out looking at all the devices and wondering which one was relevant...

there was even no driver to support my cd-rom... felt rather out of sorts with that. not sure if it was automatically installed later on.

then again... am thinking of going back to try debian again. now that i'm more familiar with linux on the whole...

Hmm...
If you're worried about playing with your partitions, then:[list=1][*]Get a program that will allow you to make a ghost image of your Windows harddisk (Norton Ghost, DriveStar, etc).[*]Make the image of your 20Gb HDD onto one of your 'storage disks'.[*]Make sure that a copy of the program (in it's entirety) is also held on the 'storage disk'.[*]Make a Windows boot disk.[*]Use a program like DriveStar to make an image of your current MBR (Master Boot Record). I'm not sure if any other programs will let you do this, but this DriveStar util is damn handy![*]Make sure that a copy of this program is also held on the 'storage disk'.[*]Defragment your Windows 20Gb harddisk.[*]Install Mandrake, and if you want, let it sort out the partition sizes for you.[*]Install either Lilo or Grub.[/list=1]

Now, should you not get on with Linux, then you can:[list=1][*]Insert the Mandrake installation CD.[*]Remove all the partitions on your 20Gb HDD, and create a single Windows partition.[*]Quit the installation program before you install anything.[*]Reboot using the Windows boot floppy.[*]From the dos prompt, type fdisk /mbr. This should put the old MBR back (the one that will let you boot Windows only). If this does not work, run the DriveStar program and copy the old MBR image back onto the MBR (this is why I have found it very handy).[*]Run the ghosting program and deghost the image from your storage disk back onto the 20Gb disk.[*]Reboot.[/list=1]
With any luck, you should now have a system that is exactly as it was before.

You do not necessarily need to use the DriveStar program to make a copy of the MBR, but if you do a search here for problems with the MBR, you will find numerous entries! At least this offers a little protection from making life damn difficult.

Here's how it worked out. I moved all irreplacable data to a storage drive. Let the programs and Win98 flap in the wind. Used FIPS. (After scandisk, defrag) Installed RH7. Played, had fun. found it to be buggy. Dumped it. D/L'd RH7.2 iso's. Installed from a storage drive over previous linux partition. Piece of cake. Remarkable how much more user friendly RH7.2 is, installation-wise. Having a great time learning and really appreciate all of your help.

Now, onto SAMBA....